Paper Title: Bringing NVMe-oF to Hyperscalers with SmartNICs

Paper Abstract: NVMe over Fabrics is growing in popularity but many cloud and hyperscale applications cannot use it because the operating system or hypervisor does not yet support an NVMe-oF initiator. In addition, bare metal cloud architecture often prefers local storage over networked storage, but cloud service providers prefer shared networked storage as more flexible and efficient. A solution is to virtualize NVMe-oF networked storage so it looks and acts like (emulates) a local NVMe SSD. This is now possible using SmartNICs such as the Amazon Nitro or the Mellanox BlueField. SmartNICs let almost any operating system, including Windows and VMware, consume NVMe-oF by emulating local NVMe storage with hardware-accelerated virtualization. Cloud and hyperscale applications can then enjoying both the performance and nearly universal support of NVMe together with the flexibility and efficiency of networked NVMe-oF.

Paper Author: Idan Burstein, Staff Silicon Architect, NVIDIA

Author Bio: Oren Duer is Principal Software Architect at Mellanox Technologies, where he focuses on developing storage accelerations and offloads. He works to enable those features in different operating systems, hypervisors, and storage software stacks. Oren is currently leading the development of NVMe over Fabrics and Persistent Memory over Fabrics accelerations, and previously led the development of RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Acceleration) in other storage protocols and solutions, including iSER (iSCSI Extensions for RDMA), SRP (SCSI RDMA Protocol), and Ceph. Previously Oren was Director of Storage Software for Mellanox and prior to that worked as a software engineer at Montilio. Oren has a computer science degree from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.